Seven years agoalthough thanks to the horrors of George Bush's
reign of state terrorism it seems vastly longer than thatthe Waco
Willy Clinton administration, ever fearful that Americans might be
equipped for and capable of defending themselves from its predations,
served up a list of 83,000 human sacrifices on the altar of victim
disarmament.

"Victim disarmament" is the accurate term for "gun control", as
its principal purpose and effect is to render the act of self-defense
impossible. Its visible effect on gun-grabbers in public debate is
soul-satisfying.

Those 83,000 names belonged to military veterans suffering from
disabilities like "post-traumatic stress disorder", a phenomenon as
old as war itselfit's been called many different things: "shell
shock", "combat fatigue"but which genuine science (as opposed to
the primitive religion known as "psychology") knows very little about.
The names were added to the National Criminal Information System
(NCIS) presumably so they would be red-flagged by a Brady background
check and their owners could thereby be deprived, for highly dubious
pseudomedical reasons, of their Constitutional right to buy or own
firearms.

Any actual psychopathology here was purely on the part of Clinton
and his evil minions. This was their way of displaying gratitude to
the men and women who had served them (never mind the advisability of
the cause) by laying their lives on the linesomething that Clinton
himself, along with the current coop of Republican chicken-hawks, have
consistently demonstrated that they feel they are too good to do
themselves.

Now the Clinton administration's illegal, irrational, and utterly
inexcusable mistreatment of veterans has been added to and extended,
thanks to a foul political carrion-eater in the United States Congress
by the name of Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat who has extracted
her entire public career from the bleeding wounds of her murdered
ex-husband, famously shot down by a black racist on the Long Island
Railway.

For which all of us, of course, are to be punished.

McCarthy's latest contribution to abusing the helpless victims of
violent crime (victim disarmament would appear to be the woman's
principal political focus) is House Resolution 2640, which opens the
medical records of millions of veterans to the kind of pseudomedical
scrutiny that can instantly deprive innocent individuals of their
Constitutional rights, solely on the word of some random anti-gun
quack.

That's what I said. There isn't any way to say it more politely,
nor to accurately describe a loathesome specimen like McCarthy, whose
bloodthirsty opportunism and contemptuous disregard for the highest
law of the landthe first ten amendments to the Constitution,
commonly known as the Bill of Rightsis simultaneously pathetic and
nauseating.

Shockingly, disgustingly, this mental and moral miscarriage has
actually been passed into lawon an uncounted voice voteby the
House of Representatives last June 13. It is now up for consideration
by the Senate, sponsored by another of victim disarmament's usual
suspects, Patrick Leahy, with the cheerful encouragement of Charles
Schumer, the necrotic heart and soul of the lunatic notion that the
most effective strategy for protecting people is to deprive themat
government gunpoint, if necessaryof their best means of defending
themselves

If it passes in the Senate, it means that millions of individuals
with the inclination to possess personal weapons (and in this case,
government training to employ them effectively, which makes them ten
times as scary to the gungrabbers) will be deprived of their defense
against a runaway state. Interestingly, like nearly all such victim
disarmament schemes, this latest persecution is being carried out at
the behest of those very politicians who most clearly dream droolingly
about taxing and regulating the American Productive Class right out of
existence.

Of course none of this is particularly new.

In fact, it's downright ancient.

By some accounts, the Roman Empire lasted for about 22 centuries,
from the founding of the city in 753 B.C. (it began as a republic in
509 and that went on until 31nearly four centuries longer than the
American republic lasted) to the fall of Constaninople to the Turks in
1453 A.D. The American Empire hasn't quite hung on for a tenth of that
time, from 1776the 1860 fall of Fort Sumter marks the end of our
republicto the present, and already, clearly, it's beginning to
disintegrate.

Of course that doesn't mean that the American Empire won't
struggle to survive, and destroy a great many innocent lives in the
process.

Whenever an empire sends massive numbers of its legionnaires to
foreign countries to extend its holdings, whether it be to Thrace,
Palestine, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, it's always a dangerous,
history-altering risk to bring them back home again. What may have
begun as a colorful, musical, flag-waving exercise of patriotism can
end all too soon in disillusioned cynicism if a war doesn't go well,
or troops feel themselves "knifed in the back" by the politicians at
home.

Consider the infamous "Bonus Army" of 1932: World War I veterans
who had been promised an infusion of extra cash sometime in 1945when
bonds they held maturedbut who suddenly found themselves in a
Depression, needed the money now, and hopped freights and marched on
Washington, only to be violently set on and burned out by the regular
Army under the command of Douglas McArthur, with the help of George S.
Patton, on the orders of President Herbert Hoover. Several former
soldiers and a number of civilians (including kids) were injured or
killed.

Or think about what happened after the close of World War II, when
black G.I.s returned from combat in Europe and the Pacific, unwilling
to suffer any more from racist persecution on the part of the white
establishment.

After the War between the States, America had the west to pour
both Confederate and Yankee veteranspotential troublemakersinto.
Rome protected itself from this kind of thing (the government's
primary fear in those days was of ambitious proconsuls, or territorial
governors, with delusions of dictatorship) with a stringent rule
against bringing an armed and organized force back from the provincesuntil
Julius Caesar broke that rule by crossing the Rubicon River,
the border between Roman territory and his turf in provincial Gaulbringing
his army home intact in 49 B.C. Rome would never be the same
again.

For the most part, Rome was accustomed to paying off each of its
former soldiers with land and whatever they needed to farm it. America
bestows upon its obsolete heroeswho, increasingly, have had to
resort to welfare and food stamps just to feed their families during
their enlistmentmysterious diseases, homelessness, and despair.
Today, it's claimed that about one homeless man in four is a military
veteran.

And now the American Empire will be the firstas far as I knowto
try to have its no longer useful warriors relieved of their
weapons by the pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo of what amounts to little
more than a cult of shamans. How well that will work remains to be
seen.

I'm willing to bet it was a military man who first said that no
good deedin this case defending your countrygoes unpunished.
One thing is absolutely certain: this time it is the politiciansimperialistic,
criminal would-be conquerors like McCarthy, Leahy, and
Schumerand not the empire's soldiers, who have crossed the River
Rubicon.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The
American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach,
Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,
Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website
"The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel
Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a
literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the
epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo"
May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The
Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was
published by BigHead Press
www.bigheadpress.com
has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at
www.Amazon.com,
or at BillOfRightsPress.com.